It was the early 1980’s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and a hospice worker in New York City named Ganga Stone was carrying a meal to a dying man.

On the street, she met a minister who told her, “You’re not delivering meals. You are delivering God’s love.” Although the organization that grew from that first delivery has no religious affiliation, the name stuck.

In the 30 years since, HIV/AIDS has been transformed from a killer to a chronic illness. The spectral young men in wheelchairs who were ubiquitous in sections of New York City and San Francisco are now gone.

The success of the battle against HIV/AIDS might have put God's Love We Deliver out of business, but in fact the opposite happened. Every year it delivers more meals. The total number of meals delivered is more than 16 million.

“We’d learned so much about taking care of people who were sick,” says the organization's current president and CEO Karen Pearl. “How could we not take that knowledge and now apply it more broadly?”

So as the AIDS threat was diminishing, God’s Love We Deliver expanded its mission to include people with other illnesses including cancer, Parkinson’s, heart failure, and kidney failure. Today only about a quarter of its clients have HIV/AIDS.

God's Love We Deliver started delivering meals to people with HIV/AIDS and expanded to help those with cancer and other serious illnesses.

The mission was expanded in 2001, just in time for the worst crisis in New York’s history. God’s Love We Deliver provided more than 3,000 meals to the workers at Ground Zero after 9/11. The organization also provided more than 8,000 meals to New Yorkers flooded by Hurricane Sandy.

Last year, the organization lost one of its biggest supporters, Joan Rivers. “She was the real deal,” says Pearl. “Joan didn’t just come for a picture. Joan put on an apron, a hair net, and got into the kitchen and chopped and worked. She went out on deliveries. She talked with volunteers. She was never rushed…. We miss her.”

The organization has made new high-profile friends, including fashion designer Michael Kors who donated $5 million dollars to help God’s Love We Deliver rebuild and expand its headquarters in lower Manhattan.

But God’s Love We Deliver could not function with big donors alone. It depends on its more than 8,000 volunteers to chop, pack, and personally deliver the meals. Because these meals are intended for people battling serious illnesses, the organization must ensure the food is properly handled at every stage, so all the chopping and prep work is done by hand in the God’s Love We Deliver kitchens.

The organization has never had a waiting list. “We believe that being sick and hungry is a crisis that demands an urgent response,” Pearl says. The organization tries to get a meal out the next day to anyone who asks.

In its early days, God’s Love We Deliver was mostly providing essential calories to people who were wasting away from AIDS. But today it is providing nutrition to people who are living, not dying.

“Food is medicine,” is a popular slogan at the organization. Nutritionists design the menu, and meals are individually tailored to meet specific medical needs like low-salt or low-fat. But Pearl says taste is as important as nutrition when designing meals for sick people.

“It takes a lot of energy to eat,” she says. “If it doesn’t look good, smell good and invite you, you often will not eat, and our goal is to get people to want to eat.”